wrote:

The specific client I am trying to replace does identify itself as VT440,
which may be amusing to some. VT440 is obviously not as common as VT420 or
VT220. Whether that's right or wrong or common or rare, so what.

The section DEC Terminals at a Glance in "DEC Video Terminals" seems to
indicate that VTx40 terminals can display ReGIS and sixel graphics.

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/dec.html


Part of the confusion is my fault. For quite some time, the
"DEC Terminals" page at that URL has contained the following text:

"The next generation consisted of the VT320, VT330, and VT340,
while a further generation comprised the VT420 and VT440."

Today I have changed it to omit the reference to the VT440 and have
put a small note to correct the false impression.

Among my collected terminal documents is one prepared by DEC as an
internal specification of the VT510 model, which consists largely of
a kind of checklist of DEC terminal models and features implemented
in each one. Encoded in Postscript, this file resides he

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/termi...n_checklist.ps

While it contains entries for many DEC terminal types, including VT100,
VT220, VT320, VT340, VT420, and the VT510, it contains no reference to
anything called "VT440".

An educated guess on what happened: it is likely that, when the VT420
was being specified and positioned to replace the text-only VT320, DEC
decided that the design effort necessary to make a replacement for the
graphics-capable VT340 was too great, given the market projections for
sales of this hypothetical "VT440". So the existing VT340 model was
retained in the catalog and sold alongside the VT420 until the VT525
took over as the graphics product. Peter Sichel might know the whole
story, but he doesn't seem to read this newsgroup much anymore.

(The VT330 was an interesting beast: if I recall correctly, it could
display only text, but it could connect to two separate sessions at
the same time, displaying one on the top of the screen and one on the
bottom. There were two serial ports, but the device could also obey
the patented "Terminal Device Session Management Protocol" to multiplex
two sessions on one wire. Apparently the VT420 also implemented TDSMP,
but the control sequences never appeared in the product documentation.)

As to terminal emulators that can do graphics: I have never seen a
freely available package capable of ReGIS. A few of the commercial
products can/could do it, such as WRQ Reflection, SmarTerm 340, Rumba,
DCS EM340, poly-STAR/GW, and KEAterm:

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/termi...ators_news.txt

The old MS-DOS Kermit by Joe Doupnik can do the more bit-map-like
Sixel graphics, but (to my knowledge) Kermit-95 cannot. (But perhaps
Frank will comment...)

--
Prevent bovine juvenile deliquency: adopt a cow today.
http://www.stonyfield.com/HaveACow/

In comp.terminals Richard S. Shuford wrote:

As to terminal emulators that can do graphics: I have never seen a
freely available package capable of ReGIS. A few of the commercial
products can/could do it, such as WRQ Reflection, SmarTerm 340, Rumba,
DCS EM340, poly-STAR/GW, and KEAterm:

Also (according to the documentation), dxterm (DEC term). I don't have a test
for that, but thought it implied that dxterm would support soft fonts as well.
But it doesn't (or else the test I wrote against a vt420 is too fragile to work
with a second terminal ;-)

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 12:00:00 -0500, Richard S. Shuford wrote:

An educated guess [...]
the existing VT340 model was
retained in the catalog and sold alongside the VT420 until the VT525
took over as the graphics product.

The VT525 isn't graphical. It's a very nice colour text terminal though,
that just plugs straight into a VGA monitor.

(The VT330 was an interesting beast: if I recall correctly, it could
display only text

The VT330 is the monochrome brother of the colour VT340. (I'd like a
VT340, but I only have a VT330.)

--
Paul
Manx, a catalogue of online computer manuals: http://vt100.net/manx/